Codename: Kids Next Door
Codename: Kids Next Door, also known as Kids Next Door or by its acronym KND, is an American animated television series created by Tom Warburton and produced by Curious Pictures in Santa Monica, California. The series debuted on Cartoon Network on December 6, 2002 and aired its final episode on January 25, 2008. This show has been considered as one of Cartoon Network's most popular in its history. The series came about as the result of a viewer's poll by Cartoon Network. The main characters of the series are five 10-year-old children who operate from their high-tech treehouse. Their mission is to fight crime committed by adults, senior citizens and teenagers and other evil children. They make up what is known as Sector V of a worldwide organization called the Kids Next Door. The show was also part of Cartoon Network's series, Cartoon Cartoons, and is the 13th Cartoon of the series. On April 13, 2012, this series returned to Cartoon Network in re-runs on the revived block, "Cartoon Planet". Overview Production History Mr. Warburton created a pilot episode for another show, Kenny and the Chimp. Originally, there was a group of children who called themselves "The Kids Next Door" among the recurring characters, and would often get Kenny into trouble. The plotline was then changed to focus on the group of kids alone, and later, the kids battling adulthood. In 2001, the show's pilot episode, "No P in the OOL", won a Cartoon Network viewer's poll. As a result, Codename: Kids Next Door was greenlit to become a series. Storylines The episodes are titled as the Kids Next Door's missions, denoted as "Operation:" followed by an acronym which often gives viewers clues as to what the story is about. Every mission may or may not be chronologically ordered in relation to the previous or the next, but it's accepted that most of the time they occur in the order that the episodes are shown. Sometimes missions make a references to certain situations, or lead to consequences in another mission. Mostly in the earlier episodes, the stories were often about typical childhood problems, but magnified and exaggerated. As the series progressed, a bigger, more complex storyline developed. '''KND Universe ''' The world portrayed in KND is one that resembles childhood make-believe, with children going on epic adventures, and creating secret weapons and tools from everyday items and refuse. The series continually straddles the borderline of admitting whether the events are meant to be interpreted as the imagination of children or taken verbatim as a cohesive universe. The Episode 'Operation: A.R.C.H.I.V.E.' addresses this dichotomy most directly; Numbuh One's school teacher dismissing his report on the great Adult Conspiracy as fiction, only to be seen later making a surreptitious phone call with the message "They Know". The Kids Next Door Organization is a worldwide group comprising thousands of kids joined in mutual struggle against adult tyranny. They fight villains that embody specific menaces to children overall (and at times, commit acts that are downright illegal). For every member of Kids Next Door, upon following a period of training, the kids then choose a number or alphanumerical code (deliberately spelled "numbuh,") and sent to a "sector", that is, a treehouse of gigantic proportions. The main headquarters of the Kids Next Door, the Moon Base, is located on the moon. Kids follow their oath of protecting other kids as well as battling adulthood until the age of 13, when they are "decommissioned": their brains are washed-clean of memories of any past KND activity, upon which they are hence considered teenagers, and a threat to KND as well. Such a practice has inevitably led to the creation of many KND villains (notably Cree, Numbuh 5's older sister, and Chad, formerly numbuh 274 and supreme commander of the Kids Next Door). The practice of strict decommissioning at age 13 was later on revealed to be subject to some exceptions: kids who have proved to be exceptional agents are offered the chance to carry on in KND as spies infiltrating the teen organization (see Maurice and Chad for a prime example). This practice is kept secret. Decommissioning has also proved reversible due to a recomissioning module used twice in the series, once in Operation: E.N.D. and once again in the full length motion-picture Operation: Z.E.R.O., where it is subsequently destroyed by the first member of the Kids Next Door and their founder Numbuh Zero (also Numbuh One's dad). Category:Shows Category:Cartoon Network Shows Category:Original Articles Category:The City Cartoons Movie (2002)